Insight on the News - World

Release date: April 25, 2004

Issue date: 5/11/04

Iraqi Weapons in
Syria

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

On Dec. 24, 2002, nearly three months before
fighting in Iraq began, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused
Saddam Hussein's regime of transferring key materials for his weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) programs to Syria in convoys of 18-wheel
trucks to hide them from U.N. weapons inspectors. "There is
information we are verifying, but we are certain that Iraq has
recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria," Sharon
told Channel Two television in Israel.

Before talking about this on Israeli
television, Sharon gave detailed information to the Bush White House
on what Israel knew and what it suspected. Insight has learned,
however, that once the information was handed over to the U.S.
intelligence community, officials at the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) swept it aside as lacking
credibility.

In May 2003, just as major combat operations
in Iraq were winding down, new reports surfaced in Israel, this time
alleging that convoys of Iraqi water tankers carrying WMD components
crossed the border into Syria repeatedly between Jan. 10 and March
10. The tankers reportedly were met by Syrian special forces and
escorted to the heroin poppy fields of a Syrian-controlled area in
Lebanon's Bekáa Valley, where their contents were dumped into
specially prepared pits and buried. Again, INR discounted the
reports, U.S. officials tell Insight.

Reports of Iraqi WMD winding up in Syria were
not just coming from the Israelis. In October 2003, retired Air Force
Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping
Agency, revealed that vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy
satellites indicated that material and documents related to Saddam's
forbidden WMD programs had been shipped to Syria before the war. It
was no surprise that the United States and its allies had not found
stockpiles of forbidden weapons in Iraq, Clapper told a breakfast
briefing given to reporters in Washington. "Those below the senior
leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to
extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," he
said.

"We have had six or seven credible reports of
Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior
administration official tells Insight. "In every case, the U.S.
intelligence community sought to discount or discredit those
reports."

This January, after he returned to Washington
from Iraq, where for six months he had served as the CIA's top gun
with the Iraq Survey Group hunting for Saddam's banned weapons, David
Kay said he had uncovered evidence that weapons material had been
moved to Syria shortly before the war. "We are not talking about a
large stockpile of weapons," he told the Sunday Telegraph in London.
"But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi
officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war,
including some components of Saddam's WMD program. Precisely what
went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that
needs to be resolved."

Another piece of this puzzle was provided by a
Syrian intelligence officer in letters smuggled to an antiregime
activist living in Paris named Nizar Nayouf. In one letter the source
identified three locations in Syria where WMD materials had been
buried under an agreement between the Syrian and Iraqi leadership.
Two of the sites were specially dug underground bunkers and tunnels.
The third site was a factory operated by the Syrian air force in the
village of Tal Sinan, located between the cities of Hama and
Salimiyyah. In a follow-up letter dated Jan. 7, Nayouf's source
provided more details on these locations, along with a map, and
alleged that some of the weapons had been moved out of Iraq in
ambulances.

So are Saddam's WMD stockpiles in Syria? When
Insight asked the CIA if it was investigating these and other
reports, a spokesman acknowledged there was "some evidence that way"
and that the United States was "looking at all types of
possibilities," but vigorously discouraged further inquiries.
Administration officials tell Insight that the refusal to report on
Syria's complicity with Saddam's regime stems from a "pro-Syria bias
in the State Department and some elements of the intelligence
community, whose threshold for evidence on Syria is suspiciously
high."

Shoshana Bryen regularly escorts groups of
retired U.S. military flag officers (admirals and generals) to Israel
for meetings with senior Israeli political and military leaders, as
well as intelligence officials. "We went to Israel just before the
war and just after," she tells Insight. "Both times, Israeli
intelligence officials told us, yes, WMD were definitely in Iraq, and
that they had been sent to Syria." The Bush administration was trying
to downplay these reports, she believes, "because if Iraqi weapons
are in Syria, we're going to have to do something about it, and they
don't want another war."